


We Promised Our Mothers We'd Write

by theshipsfirstmate



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, OTA fic, Post 4x03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 13:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5091722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post4x02 fic that became a post 4x03 fic. About OTA, and each of them individually. And Laurel, and Thea, and all the stuff that's about to go down.</p>
<p>Also, it's about how Felicity absolutely would not have fallen for the "spa weekend" excuse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Promised Our Mothers We'd Write

_A/N: This started as a post-4x02 fic, then became a post-4x03 fic. It’s about OTA and Olicity and Laurel and Thea and how they’ve got all this shit to handle between them. Also, there’s no way Felicity buys the “spa weekend” excuse. Title from “Goodnight Saigon” by Billy Joel, so do with that what you will._

**We Promised Our Mothers We’d Write**

“This is nice,” John says later, finally finishing his first beer and, to Felicity’s delight, tucking into the second one the waitress left him her last time around.

“Yeah, it’s good to go out again,” Oliver nods beside her. She can feel the movement across his shoulders, where her arm is draped lazily. “And it’s good to have you back, John.”

“I meant the two of you,” her friend – their brother – says with a nod and a little smirk as he swishes the neck of his beer bottle between them. Oliver’s hand, resting maybe just a little too high on her thigh, tenses just slightly. “Finally got your magnetic poles turned the right way.”

It’s an apt metaphor, and one that takes Felicity completely by surprise. She’s missed him so much, and she’s momentarily overwhelmed with relief that they’re here together, all three of them. It’s too much to put into words, the magnitudes she feels for these two men, men who have both changed and saved her life, several times over.

“We’re not usually…so much, with the touching,” she lies instead. The smirk Digg gives her tells her he knows it. “But, to be fair, all three of us did get attacked by a razor card-generating metahuman today, so…”

Oliver’s hand tightens almost to the point of discomfort then, but it’s okay. The joke wasn’t really for his benefit, anyway.

“It’s okay, it’s nice,” their friend says with a serious looks that he pushes away quickly, choosing instead to roll his eyes. “I mean, it was getting exhausting, all that dancing.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk,” Felicity fires back, “Mr. Remarried-My-First-Wife!”

The comment, and the final sip of salt around the rim of her glass triggers a feeling in her stomach that goes deeper than the warm glow of tequila. It feels like it’s been three or four lifetimes since they met for margaritas after the Dodger case, and it’s crazy to remember how unattached the three of them were then. At least, compared to now. She waits until Oliver excuses himself to the bathroom before she dares to ask.

“So, does this mean we can come see baby Sara?” Her voice comes out sounding smaller than she’d like, but the chill of nerves are warmed when her friend’s face relaxes.

“Felicity, you’re always welcome in my home,” Digg tells her, like she was crazy to think differently. “You always were.”

“I didn’t know, John, I wasn’t sure where we stood.” She shakes her head, unable to look at him, remembering the first time she wanted to call him on their trip. Something driving down the coast had triggered a memory and it pains her now that she can’t remember what it was, just the wave of anguish that had drowned her when she realized that hers might not be a welcome message. She remembers how they had stayed in that night, how she had tried to keep from crying, knowing it would only make Oliver blame himself. “I didn’t want to assume anything. And it’s not like you were rolling out the carpet.”

“You two are family,” Digg says, matter-of-fact, even if he sounds less than thrilled at the idea. “Besides, Lyla’s already past it, and we both know she makes the rules of the house.”

Felicity smiles at his joke, and the dread that she’s been carrying for months lifts just slightly. “You have to see how much he’s changed, John. I mean, you see it, don’t you?”

Digg’s only able to nod slightly, before Oliver’s back at her side, sliding a hand down her arm as he sits beside her, taking a second to tangle their fingers together.

“Speaking of family,” John deflects when their focus returns to him. “When are Thea and Laurel getting back?”

“Couple days I think,” Oliver said. “Laurel said a spa weekend, that’s what, three or four days?”

“Wait, what…a spa…?” Felicity’s blood runs cool and she pulls her hand back from his, already reaching for her tablet. “I thought you said…”

Her mind starts spinning when she trails off, realizing she can’t actually remember what he told her. In the madness of Palmer Tech that week, not to mention in the week since, she’s been so preoccupied. But that wouldn’t have gotten past her, right? A look at John’s face shows her the same concern she’s feeling in her gut.

“The two of them haven’t taken so much as a night off since we started,” John tells them, his finally-relaxed visage furrowing again. “I don’t want to say something’s up, but…”

Felicity nods at him, then turns to watch Oliver’s face fall. She knows he probably heard nothing beyond “something good for Thea,” but at the moment she’s more worried about what kind of fire they’re about to try and put out. She clicks through her applications and runs one search three separate times to try and stop her gut from rolling before she looks up to meet two familiar pairs of expectant eyes.

“The tracker I installed on Thea’s phone says they’re at the private airfield,” she says, and then she waits.

Oliver turns to her in a mild rage that feels an awful lot like a reflex. “You put a tracker on my sister?”

“Yes,” she tells him without remorse, then turns back to quadruple-check the data on her tablet. “And we can talk about that, or we can talk about how they just got back from three days in Nanda Parbat.”

“Jesus,” John nearly chokes out.

“What?” Oliver looks panicked, like he knows the answer, but some deep-seeded defense mechanism is keeping him from putting the final pieces together. She takes the moment to double-check her data, and confirm that Thea and Laurel had been at the cemetery the night they left.

“You think it’s coincidence that Laurel wants to go to Nanda Parbat the same week that Thea freaks out from the Pit?” She almost has to look away when she sees the suggestion come together grotesquely in his mind. “You think you’re the only person in the whole world who might try something crazy to save their sister?

“I didn’t tell her!” Oliver yells, and she can tell the second he realizes what a worthless protest it is. His second time around is softer. “That’s  _why_  I didn’t tell her.”

“You weren’t the only one there, Oliver,” she reminds him needlessly. There’s no way Laurel doesn’t know by now, right?

“How…” Oliver’s lost in a conundrum of his own. “Why would Thea…”

_Go to Nanda Parbat? Return to the father who brainwashed her into a killing machine? Remember the time she were dead and then resurrected? Face the woman whose beloved she shot off the top of a building? Face that woman herself, when they bring her back from the dead?_  The list of things Thea’s doing that Felicity doesn’t understand is essentially endless.

“She’s looking for answers,” John says, and of course, he’s right. “Just like the rest of us.”

Then, Oliver’s desperate eyes are on her, like she’s got anything more than questions herself. “What do we do?”

She just grabs his hand and squeezes it tight. “Let’s go get some answers.”

* * *

Digg pulls them right up onto the tarmac, where there’s a police SUV parked beside a tiny private plane and Oliver storms out, just in time to meet Laurel, who slams out of the driver’s seat of the truck and comes at him with equal intensity. At least one person was ready for this encounter. Thea exits the passenger seat at the same time, but stays a few steps behind, keeping her head down.

“Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” he says and his voice might actually be shaking. Bile rises in Felicity’s throat when a howl sounds from the cage in the back of the truck, and she takes a tiny moment to rue that this situation, and the tech she’s carrying, doesn’t really allow her to hold his hand.

“You’re one to talk!” Laurel’s already near full-volume, and whether it’s defensiveness, or adrenaline, or something extra, her voice sounds just exactly on the edge. “Where do you think I got the idea?”

“Laurel…Thea wasn’t even dead!” His sister doesn’t even flinch behind her.

“Exactly! You couldn’t even bear to lose her!” Tears are streaming down Laurel’s face, but she doesn’t miss a beat. “Ollie, you can’t even imagine what it’s like…”

“Stop it.” Oliver sputters. “This isn’t the same. Sara’s been…I mean, she’s been gone for…”

“A year,” Laurel finishes for him. “A whole year, and it doesn’t get any easier. Because she’s not supposed to be gone!”

“Laurel, come on,” Digg tries, beside her, but the other woman just shakes her head, voice lost on a sob. Screams from the trunk of the SUV fill the silence and they all pretend not to hear it, for different reasons.

“It’s done, John.” Felicity watches Laurel go cool as she turns back to address Digg, so opposite from her approach Oliver. It makes her feel like the other woman knows something she doesn’t. “Malcolm Merlyn killed her in first place, all I did was make him bring her back. You know something about righting wrongs, don’t you?”

“It’s how I felt when you were gone, Ollie,” Thea finally speaks up from where she’s wrapped around herself. “I knew, somehow I knew that you were still out there, and I…I would have done anything to get you back.”

“Thea…when I was gone before…This isn’t the same.” His voice is totally broken and it’s like he can’t even stop himself from turning away. “Laurel, you have to know, this guilt is a special kind of hell.”

Somehow, this is what makes Thea flinch.

“Because it’s never gonna get better,” he continues. I’ll never regret bringing her back, and at the same time, I know all the side effects, the darkness that’s taken over her, that’s all because I wasn’t strong enough to let her go.”

“It is,” Thea echoes, and turns on her brother at the sound of another scream from the back of a truck, exploding like the words have taken TNT to a dam somewhere inside of her. “This is all your fault!”

Oliver starts backward in surprise, and his sister matches him step for step. It’s the same rage that Felicity recognizes from few days again, but this is nothing like their showdown in the lair. This isn’t the Green Arrow and Speedy, this is Oliver and Thea Queen.

“You’re so fucking selfish, Ollie!” she keeps screaming, and Felicity know the sound is Ra’s sword piercing him clean through a thousand times over. “You get to disappear whenever you feel like it, take off whenever things get hard, but you couldn’t just let me go.”

“ _Never_ ,” Oliver chokes out, just before she pounces at him.

Felicity cries out on instinct, knowing his reflexes are compromised by the million-pound weight his sister just dropped solidly on his chest. Thea whirls around at the sound, eyes black and unrecognizable.

“And you!” she yells, in some kind of rage that locks Felicity’s knees. “You took him away!”

Oliver grabs for his sister as she lunges, but Felicity tries to step back instinctively, and that’s exactly when adrenaline and a 100+ hour work week catches up to her. Her ankle rolls in her stiletto, which cracks, and she’s falling even before she can remember to let go of the tablet in her hands to break her fall. She gets one split second to regret it before her head hits the tarmac.

* * *

She wakes up in the convertible, and breathes a sigh of relief to see Oliver, alive and at the wheel, beside her. The relief is short-lived, thought, when she notices what kind of shape he’s in. It doesn’t look like there was a fight, not externally anyway. But his eyes are blank and dark and his mouth is set in a straight line. It’s an expression that haunts her from somewhere in their tortured past.

Her lips are cracked from the breeze and she has to swallow a few times to make any words come from her scratchy throat. She tries for a joke first, because they’re going to lose this thing if he never smiles again.

“Survived a metahuman, taken down by a shoe,” she offers weakly.

He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t smile. His hand tightens on the gearshift and she reaches down to pry it off, threading her fingers through his reluctant ones.

“Oliver, come on, you have to give me something.” They can’t go backwards, not now.

“John took them to HQ, they’re gonna restrain…her until we figure out what to do.” The words sounds like they’re the first that he’s spoken in hours, but she knows she wasn’t out that long.

“And Thea?” But he doesn’t offer any more, doesn’t even glance her way until they’re pulling into the parking spot at their building.

“Oliver…” she musters a weak protest when he pulls her from the car. He blows it off with barely a sound, carrying her bridal-style to their loft. He doesn’t set her down in the elevator, doesn’t even loosen his grip until he lays her down on their bed, in their bedroom. Just the thought relaxes her as he lays her head down on the pillow gingerly.

“Don’t move,” he presses the tiniest kiss to her forehead, and she lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. When he returns, he’s got supplies, and sits down next to her to start cleaning the scrape on her cheek in gentle silence.

“Oliver, back there…” she trails off and he looks at her like he knows what she’s trying to ask.  _Did he do anything he’s going to regret?_ He asks the question for purposes of self-flagellation, but she’s only worried about him.

“Nothing happened,” he answers her unspoken worry. “I…once you hit the ground, I couldn’t do anything. Laurel pulled Thea away, and John agreed to go with them.”

She nods, heart cracking a little at how lost he sounds.

“I…I couldn’t…” He looks at her then, pursing his lips as his eyebrows lift.  “I don’t know. This thing with Thea, it’s my fault. Or at least, I’m triggering it somehow. And I have no idea what we’re up against with Sara, now.”

“Oliver,” she reaches up to take his face in her hands and he leans forward so she doesn’t have to strain. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

“I needed you, first,” he tells her, eyes bright with a clean honesty that mends every crack inside of her. “Before I can figure any of it out, I need you first.”

“You really are something else now, huh?” she smiles as he leans down to press his forehead against hers.

“I’m the best I’ve ever been,” he leans in close, but keeps his lips away, like he’s got to tell her something important. “Thanks to you. And I need you, for whatever it is I’m about to become.”

“You've got it,” she tells him. She’s never meant anything more. “For better or for worse.”


End file.
